Use the Month of January to Give Your Online Business a Tune Up

Well it’s that time of year again. The holidays are over, and although
the holiday selling season is still going, it is slowing down and sales will
be back to normal by the middle of January.

Here are the steps I take every year at this time to renew and
rejuvenate my business:

Clean out excess or non-performing inventory. Inventory
sitting in closets, warehouses or garages is like money under a
mattress. It doesn’t earn any dividends and it loses purchasing power
every day. For reasons I just don’t understand people get attached to
their inventory. To me a vegetable peeler or a belt buckle –or any piece
of inventory is an inanimate object. Unless something is a collectible I
have no attachment to it. If it’s not selling, it’s just sitting there
wasting storage space, collecting dust and tying up capital.

So go
through your stuff. Put it up on eBay, Craigslist or Amazon at a steep
discount (even if you lose money on it) and get rid of it. Then take the
money you get from blowing it out and put it into something that is
selling at a profit.

Review, revise and update your website, eBay and Amazon listings.
Just before Christmas I went through my eBay listings and changed them
to 3-day listings so I would get more sales and it worked. So now I am
going back and changing them and removing the words “Great Stocking
Stuffer” and “Great Christmas Gift.” Some of my product listings are two
years old and as I am reviewing them, finding other errors and things
that are out of date.

I am doing the same things with my websites. I was looking at an article
I wrote about digital photo tips on my
EZ Cube Website and saw references to companies that are no longer in
business and removed them.

So my plan is to set aside one-hour per day for the rest of this month
just going through listings and website pages and bringing everything up to
date.

Expand into multi-channel selling. If eBay sellers learned
anything over the past three years of eBay’s incredibly inept
repositioning of their business model, it’s that you don’t want to have
all your eggs in one basket. eBay is finally starting to get things
sorted out –but this has been mostly to the detriment of small sellers
and favoring large and corporate sellers. Yes, eBay is still a good
venue to sell on, and I hope to still be selling there for years to come
–but there are other places to sell that are just as profitable.

I started selling on Amazon in 2006 and continue to expand my business
there. The advent and incredible success of Amazon’s FBA program has been
huge for sellers. In addition to eBay and Amazon we now have three websites
and I also sell on Buy.com and am looking at Sears.com.

I still believe eBay is the best place for new online sellers to start.
It does have the traffic and the lowest startup risks and costs, but once
you master eBay you want to start looking for other venues like Amazon or
your own website.

Look for new ways to make money online. The online business world
is continually changing. If you become complacent it will simply pass you
by. A good example is Facebook. I was very late to Facebook –but now I am
seeing good revenue from it by using it to promote my eBay and Amazon
listings. Had I paid more attention earlier I could have been doing that all
along.

Look for new products and wholesale sources. Just because something sold well for you this year, does not mean it’s
naturally evergreen. I am always on the lookout for new products. Many of
the best wholesale trade shows take place from January to March, and trade
shows are one of my best places to find a new product.

This is the time of year to search Global Sources for that new “killer”
product that will carry you through the year and into next years highly
profitable holiday selling season

Lastly, let me mention that as you are looking around there is a risk of
becoming unfocused. Don’t abandon any business that is working, but stay on
the lookout for new products to sell, look at things like social networking,
affiliate marketing, blogging and even offline businesses that might make
sense.

Please Note:
Some of the products and
services mentioned in this website, in articles, banner ads and
newsletters and blog posts are for products and services for which I
earn a referral fee or commission. We always evaluate anything we
recommend very carefully and each year we turn down literally dozens
of opportunities to recommend products or services where we can earn
a commission. Even though we earn a fee on some of our
recommendations, we only recommend products and services that we
feel will deliver good value and with rare exceptions, they all come
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